Cam Findlay

Posts Tagged ‘purpose’

Below shows some activities in my life where I experience “Flow” that being a place where my skills and challenges meet to allow me to perform at my very best. It also shows some of my core values and sense of purpose around these activities.
(Click the diagram to enlarge)

These are just 3 of many areas in which I find a sense of flow there are many more but focusing on these ones for now they have helped (and continue to help) me become more integrated and differentiated in my life by:

Participating in communities are various types gives me both a place to learn from others and a place to share my skills to help advance the goals of that community. I find that there is a sense of community in just about everything I do. Being part of the “Dance Music Community” and helping run events and share my music with others as a DJ and music producer. On the web development and coding side of things I am part of the “Open Source Community” where ideas around building great websites, producing reusable code that anyone can use, modify and make better drive this movement and foster a place where I can again learn from other open source participants and at times contribute back so that others may learn and make use of what I have learnt.  I am also part of a community with my Iaido training which is a subset of the greater community of people doing martial arts (Budo) in a quest to build character, mind, body and spirit in their lives.
I find that for all of my broad range of skills, talents and hobbies there is a community of people (either online or offline) that can benefit from my participation and contribution into that community.

Purpose I something that I have been thinking about a lot lately and it is still something I am not crystal clear on just yet.  I do or have done a lot of hobbies, jobs and I always put as much as I can into everything I do.

Lately however I am finding that I am spending more time in and around social networking and online communities both as something I naturally do when I am online (I participate and contribute to several forums, blogs and networking sites) and also something that I have consulted and helped others on getting their head around it.  A couple of examples being:

1) Meeting Fraser Hurrell from BrightMind Labs at X:Media:Lab, helping  and consulting him on how to align his online business model for his learning game and online community through Facebook Pages.

2) A student who had been in my summer paper earlier this year after yesterdays lecture sort me out to talk about online business and his ideas.  I had a good discussion with him about online community, different business model for existing as a business online.  Hopefully I can help him out with his ideas and how to grow his tribe around his ideas.

There have been countless other times where I have helped or given away advice to friends and people I have met around the topics of computing, communication, social networking, communities, online business the list goes on…

So something is making me seriously look at possibley having a purpose based around offering advice in helping businesses exist online within the new ideas around online community and how people can take advantage of all the great tools out there to communicate more openly, and honestly -  up, down and across their social graph.